Occidental Arts & Ecology Center

12/31/2025

We want to share with you a new video from Dave Henson, our Executive Director, that speaks to the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s core purpose and our unique role in helping advance ecological restoration and social and economic justice at this critical time in the U.S. and the world.

We are thankful to our many friends and supporters who have donated to OAEC this year. If you care to join them, there is still time to make a year-end gift!

Click the link in our bio to see our 2025 update and make a contribution. Thank you! ⁠

📹 Footage by Coldwater Collective

12/29/2025

12/11/2025

During our recent beaver coexistence training and tour we saw how devices such as Pond Levelers make human-beaver coexistence easy while ensuring neighborhoods receive the climate-stabilizing benefits that beaver provide.

Cathy of is a BeaverCorps Beaver Coexistence Professional who designed and secured permits for two new structures installed during our fall field training. When asked how living alongside beaver could benefit this suburban Sierra Nevada foothill community, she shared,

“It is important to notice that by sustaining aquatic habitat for all the abundant wildlife in the neighborhood, we are maintaining a well-hydrated green space that is less likely to burn if a fire were to come through. Here, there is also a change in how water moves over the land during storms. As it moves through the neighborhood, it spreads out in the beaver ponds, which slows the water down. The presence of their dams softens the impact of a sudden rush of water flowing through this place.”

Ready to join the beaver coexistence movement in California?
Read our latest WATER news story to learn more about beaver coexistence and our new California Beaver Help Desk.

https://oaec.org/news/coexistence-training-and-tour





The California Beaver Help Desk is a partnership with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, whose Nature Based Solutions: Wetlands and Mountain Meadows Grant Program makes this work possible.

12/04/2025

This fall, the WATER Institute took our Fuels to Flows Campaign on tour across California to share how holistic, process-based restoration builds watershed resilience, especially in the uplands, while reducing the risk of catastrophic fire.

Watch this season’s newest videos to learn how this impactful campaign inspires systems thinking and transforms siloed fuel load reduction treatments into holistic restoration practices that address fire, water, and carbon cycles together.

Learn more here: https://oaec.org/news/fuels-to-flows-goes-on-tour/


Images:
Video 1: Brock Dolman, WATER Institute Co-Director, shares the basis of the Fuels to Flows campaign at this year’s Build Like a Beaver training | Renée Rhodes/OAEC
Video 2: Kate Lundquist, WATER Institute Co-Director, teaches proper gully stuffing form for the Build Like a Beaver cohort. Gully stuffing is one technique in the Fuels to Flows toolkit. | Renée Rhodes/OAEC
Pic 1: Brock presenting at Build Like a Beaver | Renée Rhodes/OAEC
Pic 2: Brock presenting at California Landscape Stewardship Network 11th Convening
Pic 3: Kate checking in on an eastern Sierra site to see the results of a Swift Water Design PBR treatment that OAEC contributed to earlier this year. | Brock Dolman/OAEC
Pic 4: Kate and Brock with Eastern Sierra Land Trust talk organizers | Brock Dolman/OAEC


Localizing California Waters Permaculture Institute of North America
Sonoma County Ag + Open Space Eastern Sierra Land Trust The Stewardship Network

12/02/2025

During this especially dangerous time for people, climate, and ecosystems, OAEC has an important and particular job to do in addressing these challenges: to show what is possible. On our site and through many deep collaborations, we demonstrate what is achievable and scalable for individuals and communities, we advocate for meaningful system change, and we train and support changemakers – all toward the goal of an ecologically regenerative, socially and economically just world for everyone. This is what we do every day.

Check out our 2025 Annual Update to read about some of the projects OAEC is proud to have championed this year. And please support OAEC with a year-end gift. ⁠Your donation helps expand our programs and grow the resilient networks we’ve built together. ⁠

Click the link below to see the update and make a contribution. Thank you! 🌱⁠

As we move into a new year, we humbly ask for your support of OAEC’s diverse and impactful work. Your gift enables us to take bold steps toward the ecological and social transformation needed to confront today’s challenges.

11/26/2025

To reduce fire risk and create defensible space (a buffer around structures that improves their chance of surviving a wildfire and ember storm), OAEC staff, community, and external contractors have begun working together to remove vegetation and flammable materials (such as firewood and other stored materials) from around and underneath structures and trim overhanging trees to 10-20 feet above structures.

We're grateful to the Safer West County Defensible Space Incentives Project, which is funded by a CAL FIRE grant, for helping cover the costs of this work by reimbursing up to $1,000 per building for Zone 0 home hardening.

We are excited to be bringing the fire resilience, fuel-reducing work that we've been doing in our backcountry wildlands for over 30 years to the buildings that we work and live in every day. To learn more about the Defensible Space Incentives Project and what exactly we're doing to adapt and prepare for fire on our OAEC campus, read our blog post.

Learning to live in a fire-dependent ecosystem means adapting and preparing for fire in our homes and communities, especially those of us living at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). While we can’t fireproof our living and working spaces, we can reduce risks by removing combustible materials arou...

11/26/2025

“Apprentice to the beaver. Study them up. Every time you see a dam, stop and look to see how it’s impacting mountain meadows. Beaver have surveyed the place and made very specific choices. They are metabolically efficient.”— Brock Dolman, WATER Institute Co-Director and Build Like A Beaver instructor

Earlier this fall, the WATER Institute Co-Directors attended and taught at the 4th annual Build Like a Beaver (BLAB) training hosted by the California Process-Based Restoration Network, OAEC’s newest fiscally sponsored project. Over four days, 77 practitioners gathered in the eastern Sierra Nevada (Faith Valley Meadow) along the West Fork Carson River for lectures, community-building, and hands-on, process-based restoration.

We love being part of a network that works so hard to develop a thriving workforce who implements nature-based solutions that sequester carbon, store water, provide fire resilience, and create habitat throughout California.

Curious to learn more about building like a beaver? Read our latest WATER News article. https://oaec.org/news/build-like-a-beaver-2025


Image Credits:
1-6, 10, 11, 14: Renée Rhodes/OAEC
7-9, 12, 13: Brock Dolman/OAEC

American Rivers

Symbiotic Restoration Group

Anabranch Solutions

Trout Unlimited California
Upstream Ecology
-engineers

11/21/2025

This past year, we successfully installed a photovoltaic solar and battery storage microgrid system at our site in partnership with RE-volv and Vital Energy Solutions. OAEC went through a long and careful process of considering the ecological impact, energy security benefits, and economic case for making this major investment in energy resilience.

To learn more about how and why we chose to build a microgrid and all the ecological, social, and economic factors we took into account, read this blog post!☀️⚡🌱

Earlier this year shifted away from the PG&E grid to our own new solar photovoltaic and battery microgrid system that now produces all the electricity used at OAEC! One of the things that we do at OAEC is to deeply consider the “full cost accounting” associated with any significant purchase, ins...

11/18/2025

That’s a wrap on our 2025 Resilient Community Design courses! We had so much fun training the dozens of wonderful people who joined us for our Permaculture Design Certification and Food Forests courses this year. Our 2026 course dates will be released soon, with the first course of the new year in happening in April!

11/15/2025

Join us for a film screening of The Eternal Song in the OAEC Meeting Hall on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025 at 6:30 pm, followed by Q&A with the filmmakers! This film takes audiences on a cinematic journey into ancestral wisdom, healing, and connection to the living Earth.

🎥 Doors open at 6:30 pm
🎬 Film starts at 7 pm
🐝 Q&A afterwards with filmmakers Zaya Ralitza Benazzo and Maurizio Benazzo
🎟 Purchase tickets through the link in our bio & at bottom of caption

All proceeds from ticket sales, aside from event costs, will be directed to Indigenous-led initiatives in territories where The Eternal Song was filmed.

Tickets - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-eternal-song-tickets-1969985196754?aff=oddtdtcreator

11/07/2025

We are proud to announce the launch of the first-ever California Beaver Help Desk!

If you’re a land manager experiencing human-beaver conflict, this new resource makes it simple to sign up for free technical and financial coexistence assistance.

Now, beaver problems can become beaver solutions throughout California.

The California Beaver Help Desk is an easy-to-use resource that offers:

🦫 Free technical assistance for land managers navigating human-beaver conflict

💲Cost-share applications of up to 50% for project installation expenses

✏️Tuition waivers for Californians who are ready to become Certified Beaver Coexistence Professionals, through the Beaver Institute’s BeaverCorps Professional Training Program “Business Track”

💧And lots more!

The California Beaver Help Desk is now live at calbeaverhelp.org

Learn more through the link in bio!


The California Beaver Coexistence Training and Support Program is a partnership between the WATER Institute at Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, the , and , whose Nature Based Solutions: Wetlands and Mountain Meadows Grant Program makes this work possible.

📹 by Coldwater Collective

10/17/2025

Last chance to join our November Permaculture Design Course! Registration is open on our website until October 20th.

The Fall is a great time to come learn and practice hands-on permaculture skills at OAEC, as it is the time of year when water begins flowing through our demonstration site and techniques such as fire-friendly limbing and thinning as well as gully stuffing can be most effectively applied! This intensive 9-day in-person course will dive into the permaculture design process, conservation hydrology, earthworks, composting, food forests, and much more.